Here Comes Treble: Time Of The Jacarandas
...For the first two weeks of October, I watched as first one tree, then another, burst into joyous purple blossom, and the great urban forest began to blush with the almost-indecent colour of bougainvillea clambering, cerise, through dark pine trees and frothing over garden walls....
Flautist Isabel Bradley so hoped that the jacaranda trees would be in bloom when she and young pianist Michael played a programme entitled "Flute Fantasies'' at one of Johannesburg’s finest old buildings, Northwards House.
To read more of Isabel's delightful columns please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/here_comes_treble/
Most of the jacaranda trees’ purple blossoms have blown away in the storms of the last few days. There are some trees still at the peak of their blooming-time, but mostly their branches are showing black, with the green of new leaves misting their stark shapes.
For the first two weeks of October, I watched as first one tree, then another, burst into joyous purple blossom, and the great urban forest began to blush with the almost-indecent colour of bougainvillea clambering, cerise, through dark pine trees and frothing over garden walls. Lawns remained brown and dusty, waiting for the first summer rains.
“Bloom – please, please bloom!” I begged each slow-to-flower tree. I wasn’t losing my sanity, I had good reason to wish for the burst of colour the full-blooming trees would bring: my latest musical partner, young pianist Michael, and I were to perform at one of Johannesburg’s finest old buildings, Northwards House, in mid-October. This beautiful stately home, built on top of a high ridge, was designed and built by Sir Herbert Baker from golden sandstone. It is surrounded by giant jacaranda trees and its lawns and terraced gardens look out over Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Every home has a garden, and in every garden and along both sides of every street, trees have been planted and nurtured, turning Johannesburg into a huge man-made forest. Our performance was to be part of a charity fund-raiser, which was to begin with cocktails on the lawn of Northwards at five-thirty on a Sunday evening. We’d called the programme ‘Flute Fantasies’, and one of my richest fantasies for the evening was that the guests would look out over a forest festooned in swathes of purple.
Unfortunately for my fantasy, this year the jacarandas seemed to bloom in relays, one starting out as its next-door neighbour turned green and another still looked as dry as it had in mid-winter. No matter how I tried to persuade them to all bloom at once on the weekend of the concert, their display was rather half-hearted. When we drove into the entrance of Northwards on the afternoon of the concert, the huge jacarandas lining the driveway lifted stark, naked branches to an equally naked blue sky.
Leon, Michael and I walked up the shallow steps, into the cool, marble-floored entrance hall, through the high-ceilinged ballroom where the concert was to be presented and into the dining-room which was set aside as the musicians’ room. From the cottage-paned windows, we watched our audience amble around the lawns in the last of the afternoon’s warmth, gazing out over the forest that showed a few patches of purple as the full moon rose high in the still-blue sky over a neatly-trimmed green arch.
The ballroom at Northwards is two storeys high, its lower walls panelled in glowing wood, the upper walls painted a warm cream. Above the fire-place hangs a lovely portrait of Josie Dale-Lace, first and scandalous mistress of this beautiful house. Before settling at Northwards with her husband, she had her marriage to Mr Dale-Lace annulled and travelled to England, where she had an affair with a king and at least one other member of the aristocracy. She bore one of them a son, but when no marriage was offered, she returned to Johannesburg where she re-married her husband. They lived at Northwards House for several years, during which time she took to driving into town in a carriage drawn by a team of zebra. Mr Dale-Lace eventually lost his fortune and with it, Northwards House. Josie turned her talents to running an exclusive ladies’ outfitters. It is said that she haunts the ballroom at Northwards, but only when she can be sure of finding a gentleman alone there.
At one end of the ballroom, there is a minstrel’s gallery with wooden balustrades; at the ‘business end’ where we were to play, is the piano. This is a superb instrument, a Steinway with a case of highly-polished light wood decorated with exquisite inlaid pictures of lyres, oboes, violins and tambourines, all accented with wreaths. It was recently beautifully renovated at great cost. This piano, which was built in 1895, was brought to Northwards House in 1912 by the second occupants, the Albu family. One of the daughters of the house decided that the piano was the ideal home for her pet white mice. It’s just as well that mice don’t chew piano-wire, but they must have loved the felt on the hammers, and surely tried to nibble at the wood casing. The Albu children also kept monkeys, which were allowed the run of the house. It was fun to imagine monkeys swinging from the gorgeous chandeliers in that elegant ballroom, which was now filled with antique chairs and nearly a hundred people listening to our concert.
There was no doubt that the setting for this concert was one that could prompt any number of fantasies. And it was, in spite of the odd behaviour of the trees this year, ‘the time of the jacarandas,’ enabling me to illustrate that part of the theme with a poem, written several years ago to introduce Fauré’s Fantaisie:
The sky is gray
And hanging on the tree-tops…
The air is cold,
and winter wants to stay.
Here – and there,
Spring paints the trees –
Their arms still bare –
With pink and crimson.
And the jacarandas,
Root-deep in their petal-puddles,
Reach towards the looming clouds,
black branches bearing purple prayers -
Crying out - “Remember,
“oh! remember summer!”
That poem was written during a spring when the rains came early and continued far too long..
Two weeks later the jacarandas were the best they would be this year. The suburbs were painted purple, streets carpeted with glorious colour, trees holding their laden boughs proudly up to hot blue skies. One evening, I sat on the veranda of the running club that we visit each week, looking out over Northcliff Hill as the sun sank, rapidly as it always does in South Africa:
Sun sets
In silken sky of muted,
pale grey.
Hill,
dark,
stark,
Its trees glooming beyond flood-lit courts
Which sound their “bounce – bounce – bounce”.
Brilliant beam
encases brightly-purple jacaranda –
Holds it there for
one
shining
moment,
before night
closes off my sight.
Johannesburg at jacaranda time is worth seeing. There is no promise of an evening of Flute Fantasies, nor are you often likely to find the doors of Northwards House opened to the public for a special evening of entertainment. But if you visit my city in late October, you’ll find a world of trees and colour that can’t be matched anywhere else in this beautiful world.
Until next time, ‘here comes Treble!’
*
For more information on Northwards, see http://www.parktownheritage.co.za/index.htm
To read a fascinating article about Josie Dale-Lace, go to: http://joburgnews.co.za/feb_2002/northwards.stm
